The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Valencia

The world's leading authority on climate change adopted Saturday a landmark report that warns that the impacts of global warming are already visible, will accelerate this century and are potentially irreversible.

"The parties to the governments adopted the full report, consisting of a shorter synthesis and a longer version," said Jose Romero, a Swiss delegate and one of the reports many authors.

The document, to be formally presented later Saturday in the Spanish city of Valencia by UN chief Ban Ki-moon, encapsulates the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest findings on the effects of greenhouse gases. It seeks to guide politicians facing tough decisions on cutting pollution from fossil fuels, shifting to cleaner energy, bolstering defences against extreme weather, and other issues set to intensify due to climate change.

Ban warned Saturday in a published commentary to the first IPCC overview since 2001 that the world was on the verge of a "catastrophe" due to global warming. The draft report from the Nobel-winning IPCC, which was not expected to change significantly, said the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal." Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning Arctic summer sea ice and thawing permafrost shows that climate change is already on the march, it said.

By 2100, global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1.1 C (1.98 F) and 6.4 C (11.52 F) compared to 1980-99 levels, while sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres (7.2 and 23.2 inches), it forecasted.

Heatwaves, rainstorms, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level are among the events expected to become more frequent, more widespread or more intense this century.

"This is the strongest document the IPCC has produced," said Hans Verolme, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Change Program. He said that the synthesis said more clearly than any previous version, for example, that global warming was likely to be "irreversible".

"It is a tremendous result -- the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change is here. Now the ball is in the court of politicians." "All countries" will be affected, but poorer countries -- ironically those least to blame for causing the problem -- will be hit hardest and they have the least resources for coping, according to the draft report.

Publication of the report comes in the run-up to a December 3-14 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where the world's nations will gather to ponder the climate crisis. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is tasked with setting a "roadmap" of negotiations for intensifying cuts in carbon emissions beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol runs out.

Carbon pollution, emitted especially by the burning of oil, gas and coal, traps heat from the Sun, thus warming the Earth's surface and inflicting changes to weather systems.

Emissions are spiralling, driven more recently by coal-fired plants in fast-growing China and India.

Reuters, Washington

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a $50 billion Iraq war bill that included a troop pullout plan, killing the latest Democratic attempt to end the war while keeping up the fight over its funding.

Despite passionate appeals by Democrats, who noted that 2007 had been the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Iraq so far, Republicans stopped the proposal that had passed the House of Representatives on a largely partisan vote on Wednesday. The measure needed 60 votes to pass under Senate rules; it only got 53 votes, with 45 senators voting against, all but two of them Republicans.

The bill would have given President George W. Bush about a quarter of the $196 billion he wants for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal 2008, while setting a goal that all U.S. combat soldiers withdraw from Iraq by December 15, 2008.

"What will it take to end this war? How many lives, how many limbs, how many broken families, how many innocent victims?" the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked. Over 850 U.S. soldiers have died this year. "We know the president will not do this, but it is within our power" to start bringing U.S. troops home, Durbin argued. Republicans responded that the Pentagon needed the money and this was the wrong time to meddle in Iraq military strategy just when levels of violence there were falling.

Democrats have tried repeatedly to limit the war this year, and Republicans promised to keep blocking their attempts. The narrowly divided Senate, where 60 of 100 votes are often required to advance legislation, has been the graveyard for most efforts. "It's telling our soldiers, you're losers, when they're winners. So we're going to defeat it, now and forever," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said.

AP, Yangon

China called on Myanmar to speed up democratic reforms, state media reported Saturday - an unusual move for Beijing, which has traditionally refrained from criticizing the military regime.

The call came as a U.N. human rights investigator wrapped up a trip to the country that he said had helped him to determine that at least 15 people died during the junta's crackdown on pro-democracy protests in September.

China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi also expressed support for U.N. attempts to reconcile the regime and the suppressed democracy movement during a two-day meeting with the junta that ended Friday. The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported the meeting only after Wang had left the country.

China, a communist country whose own record on democratic reforms and human rights has been criticized, is one of Myanmar's largest trading partners and its main political ally. Beijing does not usually publicly criticize Myanmar's military government, a reflection of its position of strict noninterference in the internal affairs of the country. But in recent weeks, it has been credited with working behind the scenes to pressure Myanmar to embrace democratic reforms after the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations.

China also provided important backing for the mission of Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. secretary general's special envoy on Myanmar, by supporting a Security Council declaration and helping persuade Myanmar to allow him to visit twice.

As Wang's visit ended Friday, U.N. human rights investigator Paulo Sergio Pinheiro announced that at least 15 people died in Myanmar's biggest city when the military crushed the demonstrations, five more than the government had acknowledged.

"This is just in Yangon," Pinheiro said. "The government has not told me all the casualties in the country."

Reuters, Pristina

Front-runner Hashim Thaci pledged independence for Kosovo on Saturday as the breakaway province voted for a new parliament ahead of a showdown with Serbia over its bid for statehood.

"These elections are not about Kosovo's status," the former guerrilla fighter said after casting his ballot. "We will declare independence immediately after December 10."

That is the date for a report by Russian, United States and European Union mediators on last-ditch talks in search of a compromise between Serbia and Kosovo's 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority.

There is still no glimmer of a deal, with two negotiating sessions set for Brussels and Vienna in the coming week.

AP, New Delhi

The communist parties that support India's ruling coalition have backed off their strong opposition to a landmark nuclear deal with the United States, clearing the way for the pact to go forward after months of high-stakes political gamesmanship.

The Communists, who had threatened to topple the government over the accord, said Friday that the governing Congress party could go ahead with talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which would need to approve any nuclear agreement.

After meeting with the nuclear watchdog, however, the government must again consult with the communist parties, said Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

The pact would reverse three decades of American anti-proliferation policy by allowing the U.S. to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has been cut off from the global atomic trade by its refusal to sign nonproliferation treaties and its testing of nuclear weapons.

Reuters, Lahore

US envoy John Negroponte spoke to Pakistan's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Friday and said moderate forces should work together to put the country back on a democratic path. Bhutto was released from house arrest shortly before Negroponte began a visit aimed at persuading President Pervez Musharraf to end emergency rule. The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State is due to meet Musharraf on Saturday and was expected to push him to roll back the emergency invoked two weeks ago, release thousands of detainees and hold "free and fair" elections. "He reiterated t the importance of moderate forces working together in Pakistan for a better future for Pakistan and also to get Pakistan back on the pathway to constitutional rule," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack of Negroponte's telephone discussion with Bhutto. "He wanted to hear from her a little bit how she viewed the political situation in Pakistan. That is part of what he is trying to get a sense of," McCormack said in Washington.

AP, Washington

President Bush on Friday claimed "measurable results" from six-nation talks to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear-weapons operations, but said more must be done to reach the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. He praised Japan's role in the process and said the U.S. was sensitive to the importance Tokyo places on also resolving the issue of Japanese kidnapped in North Korea. Japan's new prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, standing besides Bush in the Grand Foyer of the White House, pledged to do his "level best" to get the Japanese parliament to restore naval refueling operations in the Indian Ocean that have been suspended. Bush issued a strong appeal for their resumption, saying they were vital to the war in Afghanistan. The two leaders vowed to cooperate on these and other issues that have strained relations in the past months between the world's two largest economies. It was Fukuda's first visit to Washington since he became prime minister in September. High on their agenda was North Korea, and efforts to get the communist regime to live up to its promise to abandon its nuclear ambitions. "The six-party talks have delivered measurable results," Bush said. He said the plutonium-production facilities at Yongbyon, North Korea's main nuclear complex, "are now being disabled under six-party supervision."